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Looking for MerleParticipatory archiving project, 2021-2026

Papers of Merle Woo

This project was a collaboration with Merle and her eldest child, Emily Woo Yamasaki (they/them).

Special thanks to Mariajose Bazan-Barreda, Nancy Reiko Kato, Eunsong Kim, Maggie Mang, Nick Twemlow, Nellie Wong, and the San Francisco Chapter of the Freedom Socialist Party.

Looking for Merle began as a personal project in the spring of 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown. After connecting and becoming friends with Merle and Emily, I approached them about the possibility of archiving Merle’s papers, a project that they expressed interest. Emily had wanted to for years, but lacked the time, as they lived in New York. Merle was unsure if anyone would find the papers useful, but felt that they should be archived with an institution if, and only if, they were made free and accessible to the public, in-person and online, as they contain organizing strategies and experiences from across her life teaching in Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies in state schools in Northern California and organizing for the Freedom Socialist Party, her lawsuit against UC Berkeley, the student-led divestment from South African apartheid campaign, the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal campaign, prisoner support for Marilyn Buck, and more.

The papers were curated and sold to the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in April, 2025. The finding aid for the papers was published in March, 2026. The papers are unavailable as of April, 2026, as they are being digitized. The finding aid will be updated when the papers are available for request and viewing.

To get the word out about Merle, her papers, and the histories she helped to make, we continue to bring collaborators into this project. Maggie Mang (CalPoly, San Luis Obispo) applied for a BEACoN Research Scholar grant in 2025. Together, we worked with undergraduate student Mariajose Bazan-Barreda, who researched, co-wrote, and layout-designed a zine about Merle and her papers. The zine will be available as a free PDF by the summer of 2026.

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Merle Woo is a Chinese Korean American lesbian socialist feminist born and raised in San Francisco. She is perhaps most known for “Letter to Ma,” published in This Bridge Called My Back. She co-founded Unbound Feet, a Chinese feminist poetry collective, and was a member of the Women Writers Union (SFSU). She continues to be a member of Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party. She is a breast cancer survivor and mother to Emily and Paul.

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